As the PC version of Dark Souls 3 releases on April 12th, visual enthusiasts around the world, such as myself, will want to know how they can make their copy of Dark Souls 3 look better.
In the past, there have been tools such as GeDoSaTo, which helped you downsample your resolution or hide the HUD, among other things. I'm happy to report that this time around, such tools are not needed for the majority of gamers. As an Nvidia user, you can downsample through DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) without any issues that result in the game crashing. Additionally, there is now an auto-hide HUD feature in the options menu.
With an urge to contribute to the Souls community similar to what I did with Enhanced Wasteland for Fallout 4, I took it upon myself to create a graphics enhancement preset called Rekindled FX using ReShadewith SweetFX—a post-processing injector for games. There is also a video (viewable below) to accompany the ReShade preset, which shows off a variety of 4K PC footage and also compares the difference between vanilla graphics and the SweetFX add-on.
While playing with this graphical preset turned on, you will notice additional anti-aliasing, ambient lighting, changes to the color hue, sharpening, vignetting, a tiny bit of chromatic aberration and much more. In my opinion, this is a huge step forward from the vanilla version of Dark Souls 3, which throws a distasteful sepia filter across every object.
Outside of using the above-mentioned preset, there are additional things you can do to make Dark Souls 3 look as gorgeous as can be. Once again, as an Nvidia user, open up the Nvidia Control Panel and apply additional anti-aliasing under Program Settings. Additionally, set Texture Filtering to 'High Quality' for smoother looking textures. I'd like to note that for SLI users, Dark Souls 3 currently uses the same SLI compatibility bits from Dark Souls 2 and will run at an average of 50fps on a GTX 980 video card. You are able to downsample the game via DSR with minimal FPS loss.
Here is a screenshot to show some of settings you need to apply:
If you're a Windows 10 user then you may run into framerate drops caused by using an Xbox controller on the PC version. While this is a nuisance to anyone’s gameplay experience, it can easily be remedied with a simple fix. Initially found by reddit user LarryCulpepper, a guide on Reddit details the issue and also provides a solution. According to the post, you need to open up the Device Manager in Windows and find your Xbox controller device. Next, right click it and select 'Update driver software'. When it asks how you would like to update, select "Browse computer for device software" and then select "Let me select from a list of device drivers on my computer", which should show you a list of driver versions. The post says to select version 2.1.0.1349 and then reboot your computer. After all is done, you will be able to play Dark Souls 3 on Windows 10 without any major framerate hiccups.
To view comparison screenshots and download Rekindled FX for yourself, head to the preset's official page.
As people play through the PC version releasing next week, there are bound to be more bugs that will be discovered and hopefully fixed. We will keep an eye out for these things and make sure to report them.
Check out more Dark Souls 3 launch coverage at GameRevolution:
